WCAG 2.2 checklist

WCAG groups criteria under four principles: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). Each criterion has a conformance level: A (essential), AA (the standard legal target), or AAA (enhanced, rarely required site-wide). For compliance you target Level AA, which includes all of Level A.

• Text alternatives: every meaningful image, icon, and control has a text alternative (1.1.1).
• Colour & contrast: text meets 4.5:1 (3:1 for large text); do not rely on colour alone to convey meaning (1.4.1, 1.4.3, 1.4.11).
• Structure: headings are sequential and meaningful; lists, tables, and landmarks use correct markup (1.3.1, 2.4.6, 2.4.10).
• Keyboard: everything works without a mouse, with no traps, and a visible focus indicator (2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.4.7).
• Forms: every field has a label; errors are identified and described; required fields are marked (1.3.1, 3.3.1, 3.3.2).
• Navigation & links: link text makes sense out of context; pages have titles; focus order is logical (2.4.2, 2.4.4, 2.4.3).
• Media: captions for video, transcripts for audio (1.2.2, 1.2.1).
• New in 2.2: visible focus is not obscured (2.4.11), targets are at least 24x24px (2.5.8), no functionality needs dragging (2.5.7), and authentication does not rely on memory or puzzles (3.3.8).

Automated testing reliably verifies the machine-checkable criteria: contrast, alt-text presence, form labels, heading order, ARIA misuse, and more. That is roughly a third of the criteria by count, but it catches the majority of the issues actually present on a typical page. The rest, like whether alt text is meaningful or whether focus order makes sense, needs human judgement. An honest tool tells you which is which.

Use the free scan above to clear the automatable items first. You get every failing element outlined and mapped to its success criterion, plus the items flagged for manual review. Fix those, then do a keyboard and screen-reader pass for the human-judgement criteria.